The contrast between the life of a factory-farmed pig — pumped with antibiotics, mutilated, tightly confined, and utterly deprived of stimulation — and one raised in a well-run operation using a combination of traditional husbandry and the best of modern innovations is astonishing. One couldn’t find a better pig farmer than Paul Willis, one of the spearheads of the movement to preserve traditional hog farming (and the head of Niman Ranch’s pork division, the only national supplier of nonfactory pork), and one couldn’t imagine a more seemingly depraved company than Smithfield, the largest pork packer in the nation.
It was tempting for me to write this chapter by first describing the hell of Smithfield’s factory operations and ending with the relative idyll offered by the best of the nonfactory operations. But to narrate the story of pig farming in this way would suggest that the pork industry in general is moving toward greater animal welfare and environmental responsibility, when precisely the opposite is true. There isn’t any “return” to husbandry-based hog farming. The “movement” toward family pig farms is quite real, but it is composed largely of longtime farmers learning to market themselves and thus hold their own. The factory hog farm is still expanding in America, and worldwide growth is even more aggressive.
Our Old Sympathetic Attempts
WHEN I PULLED UP TO Paul Willis’s farm in Thornton, Iowa, where he coordinates the production of pork for Niman Ranch with some five hundred other small farmers, I was a bit puzzled. Paul had said I should meet him in his office, but all I saw was an insubstantial redbrick home and a few farm buildings. It was still the quiet of morning, and a lanky white-and-brown farm cat approached. As I wandered around looking for something that fit my notion of an office, Paul was walking in from the fields, coffee in hand, wearing insulated dark blue overalls and a small cap that covered shortly cropped brown-gray hair. After a soft smile and a firm handshake, he led me into the house. We sat for a few minutes in a kitchen boasting appliances that appeared to have been smuggled out of Cold War Czechoslovakia. More coffee was waiting, but Paul insisted on making a fresh pot. “This has been out awhile,” he explained as he stripped off his insulated overalls to reveal another pair of overalls with thin blue and white stripes underneath.
“I assume you’ll want to record this,” Paul said, before launching in. That transparency and willingness to help, that eagerness to tell his story and have it spread, set the tone for the rest of our day together — even those times when our disagreements became obvious.
“This is the house I grew up in,” Paul said. “We had family dinners here, particularly on Sundays, when relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would come. After dinner, which would feature the fare of the season, such as sweet corn and fresh tomatoes, the kids would run off for the rest of the day to the creek or the grove and play until we would drop. The day was never long enough for the fun we were having. That room, which is now where I work, was the dining room, which was set up for those Sunday dinners. Other days, we ate here in the kitchen and usually had men for dinner, especially if some special project was going on — haying or castrating pigs or building something such as a grain bin. Anything that required extra help. The noon meal was expected. Only in emergency situations did we go to town to eat.”
Outside the kitchen were a couple of largely empty rooms. There was a single wood desk in Paul’s office, on which sat a computer screen buzzing with e-mails, spreadsheets, and files; maps were tacked to the wall with pins indicating the locations of Niman Ranch farmers and approved slaughter facilities. Large windows opened onto the gentle rolls of a classic Iowa landscape of soybeans, corn, and pasture.
“Let me just give you a thumbnail sketch,” Paul began. “When I came back to the farm, we began raising pigs on a pasture system, much like we do now. This was quite a bit like what was done when I grew up. I had chores when I was a boy and so on, and looked after the pigs. But there’d been some changes, especially in power equipment. In those days you were really limited by how much muscle power you had. You used a pitchfork. And that made farm work a lot of drudgery.
“So, not to digress, I was here, raising pigs like this and enjoying it. And eventually we scaled up, so we were raising a thousand pigs a year, which is similar to what we are doing today. I kept seeing more and more of these confinement buildings being built. North Carolina started ramping up at that time, Murphy Family Farms. I went to a couple of meetings, and they were all, ‘This is the wave of the future. You gotta get bigger!’ And I said, ‘There is nothing better here than what I’m doing. Nothing. It’s not better for the animals, or for the farmers, or for consumers. Nothing better about it.’ But they had convinced a lot of people who wanted to stay in the business that this was the way you had to go. I would guess this would be in the late eighties. So I started looking for a market for ‘free-range pigs.’ In fact, I invented the term.”
Had history turned out a little differently, it is not hard to imagine that Paul might never have found a market that was willing to pay more for his pigs than for Smithfield’s more readily available ones. His story might have ended at this point, like the story of the more than half a million hog farmers who have gone out of business in the past twenty-five years. As it happened, though, Paul found just the sort of market he needed when he met Bill Niman, the founder of Niman Ranch, and soon he was managing Niman Ranch’s pork production, while Bill and the rest of his corporate team found markets for Andy (Michigan), then Justin (Minnesota), then Todd (Nebraska), then Betty (South Dakota), then Charles (Wisconsin), and now more than five hundred small family pig farmers. Niman Ranch pays these farmers a nickel above the market rate per pound for their animals and guarantees its ranchers a “floor price” regardless of the market rate. Today, that ends up being about twenty-five to thirty dollars more per pig, and that modest amount has let these farmers hold on while most others have gone under.
Paul’s farm is an impressive example of what one of his heroes, the quintessential farmer-intellectual Wendell Berry, referred to as “our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes.” For Paul this means that at the heart of producing pork is letting pigs be pigs (for the most part). Happily for Paul, letting pigs be pigs includes watching them grow plump and, I’m told, tasty. (Traditional farms always beat factory farms in taste tests.) The notion here is that the farmers’ job is to find those ways of raising hogs where the animals’ well-being and the farmers’ interest in efficiently bringing them to their appointed “slaughter weight” coincide. Anyone who suggests that there is a perfect symbiosis between the farmers’ interest and the animals’ is probably trying to sell you something (and it’s not made of tofu). “Ideal slaughter weight” does not actually represent maximal pig happiness, but on the best small family pig farms, there is considerable overlap. When Paul is castrating day-old piglets without anesthetic (which happens to 90 percent of all male piglets), it would seem his interests are not so well aligned with the young boars-now-barrows, but that is a relatively brief period of suffering compared to, for example, the prolonged mutual joy shared by Paul and his pigs when he gets to let them out to run on pasture — let alone the prolonged suffering of pigs on factory farms.
In the best of the old husbandry tradition, Paul is always trying to maximize the ways his farming needs work with the needs of pigs — with their natural biorhythms and growth patterns.
While Paul runs his farm with the idea that letting pigs be pigs is central, modern industrial agriculture has asked what hog farming might look like if one considered only profitability — literally designing multitier farms from multistory office buildings in another city, state, or even country. What sort of practical difference does this ideological difference make? The most glaring one — the difference that can be seen from the road by someone who knows nothing about pigs — is that on Paul’s farm, pigs have access to earth instead of concrete and slats. Many but not all Niman Ranch pig farmers provide access to the outdoors. Farmers who don’
t provide outdoor access must raise the pigs in “deep bedding” systems, which also allow pigs to engage in many of their “species-specific behaviors” — the behaviors that make pigs pigs, like rooting, playing, building nests, and lying together in deep hay for warmth at night (pigs prefer to sleep communally).
Paul’s farm has five fields of twenty acres each, which are rotated for hogs and crops. He gave me a driving tour in his massive white empty-bed pickup. Especially after my middle-of-the-night visits to factory farms, it was remarkable how much I could see unfolding outdoors: the hoop houses dotting the fields, the barns opening to pasture, corn and soy as far as the eye could see. And in the distance, the occasional factory farm.
At the heart of any hog operation — and at the heart of hog welfare today — is the life of female breeder pigs. Paul’s gilts (female pigs that have not given birth) and sows (female pigs that have), like all gilts and sows raised for Niman Ranch, are housed in groups and are managed in a way that promotes “a stable social hierarchy.” (I’m quoting here from the impressive animal welfare standards developed with the help of Paul and several animal welfare experts, including sisters Diane and Marlene Halverson, who have a thirty-year track record of farmer-friendly animal advocacy.)
Among other rules intended to create this stable social hierarchy, the guidelines demand that “a single animal must never be introduced into an established social group.” It’s not exactly the kind of welfare promise one can imagine finding printed on the back of a package of bacon, but it’s terribly important to the pigs. The principle behind such rules is simple: pigs need the companionship of other pigs that they know to function normally. Just as most parents would want to avoid pulling their child out of school in the middle of the year and placing her in an unfamiliar one, so does good pig husbandry dictate that farmers do what is possible to keep pigs in stable social groups.
Paul also makes certain that his sows and gilts have enough room, so the more timid animals can get away from the more aggressive ones. Sometimes he’ll use straw bales to create “retreat areas.” Like other Niman Ranch farmers, he doesn’t cut off pigs’ tails or teeth, as factory operations typically do to avoid excessive biting and cannibalism. If the social hierarchy is stable, the pigs work out disputes among themselves.
On all Niman Ranch pig farms, gestating sows — that is, pregnant pigs — must be raised with their social groups and have access to the outdoors. By contrast, approximately 80 percent of pregnant pigs in America, like the 1.2 million owned by Smithfield, are confined in individual steel-and-concrete cages so small that the sows cannot turn around. When pigs leave a Niman Ranch hog farm, strong transport and slaughter requirements (from the same animal welfare standards that require the farmer to preserve a stable social hierarchy) will follow them out the gate. This does not mean that Niman Ranch’s transport and slaughter are done “the old-fashioned way.” There are many real improvements, both managerial and technological: humane-certification programs for handlers and truckers, slaughter audits, paper trails to ensure accountability, extended access to better-trained veterinarians, weather forecasts to avoid transport in extreme heat and cold, nonskid flooring, and stunning. Still, no one at Niman Ranch is in a position to demand all of the changes they’d like; that kind of leverage is had only by the largest companies. So there are negotiations and compromises, such as the long distance that many of Niman Ranch’s pigs must travel to reach an acceptable slaughterhouse.
Much else that is impressive about Paul’s farm and other Niman Ranch farms is not what you do see but what you don’t. They do not give antibiotics or hormones to animals unless there is a medical condition that makes this advisable. There are no pits or containers filled with dead pigs. There is no stench, largely because there are no animal waste lagoons. Because an appropriate number of animals are raised on the land, the manure can go back into the soil as fertilizer for the crops that will become the pigs’ feed. There is suffering, but there is more humdrum life and even moments of what seems like pure pig joy.
Paul and other Niman Ranch pig farmers not only do (or don’t do) all these things; they are required to work according to these guidelines. They sign contracts. They undergo truly independent auditing and, perhaps most revealingly, they even let the likes of me scrutinize their animals. This is important to say because most humane-farming standards are merely industry attempts to cash in on the public’s growing concern. It’s no trivial task to identify the rare company — minuscule Niman Ranch is by far the biggest — that is not just a variation on the factory farm.
As I was getting ready to leave Paul’s farm, he invoked Wendell Berry and intoned the links that inevitably and powerfully unite every purchase in a supermarket and every order from a menu with agricultural policy — that is, with the decisions of farmers and agribusiness and Paul himself. Every time you make a decision about food, Paul pleaded, quoting Berry, “you are farming by proxy.”
In The Art of the Commonplace, Berry sums up just what is at stake in the idea of “farming by proxy.”
Our methodologies . . . have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining. . . . This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations. . . . Most people . . . have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food.
It’s an empowering idea. The entire goliath of the food industry is ultimately driven and determined by the choices we make as the waiter gets impatient for our order or in the practicalities and whimsies of what we load into our shopping carts or farmers’-market bags.
We ended the day at Paul’s house. Chickens ran around the front yard, and off to the side was a pen for boars. “This house was first built by Marius Floy,” he told me, “a great-grandfather who came from northern Germany. It was built in sections as the family expanded. We’ve lived here since 1978. It’s where Anne and Sarah grew up. They walked to the end of the lane to catch the school bus.”
A few minutes later, Phyllis (Paul’s wife) broke the news that a factory farm had purchased a plot of land from neighbors down the road and would soon be building a facility to hold six thousand hogs. The factory farm would be right next to the home to which he and Phyllis had hoped to retire, a small house on a hill overlooking a piece of land that Paul has spent decades working to restore to midwestern prairie. He and Phyllis called it “the Dream Farm.” Next to their dream, now, loomed a nightmare: thousands of suffering, sick hogs surrounded by, and themselves suffering within, a thick, nausea-inducing stench. Not only will the nearby factory farm decimate Paul’s land’s value (estimates suggest land degradation from industrial farming has cost Americans $26 billion) and destroy the land itself, not only will the smell make cohabitation incredibly unpleasant at best and more likely dangerous to Paul’s family’s health, but it stands in opposition to everything Paul has spent his life working for.
“The only people that are for those are the ones that own them,” Paul said. Phyllis continued his thought: “People hate those farmers. What must it feel like to have a job where people hate you?”
In the space of that kitchen, the slow drama of the growth of the factory farm was unfolding. But there was also resistance unfolding, most palpably embodied in Paul. (Phyllis, too, has been active in regional political battles to decrease the power and presence of factory hog farms in Iowa.) And, of course, these words I’m writing spring from that moment. If this story means something to you, then perhaps the drama of the growth of the factory farm in that Iowa kitchen will help produce the resistance that will end it.
3.
Pieces of Shit
THE SCENE IN THE WILLISES’ kitchen has been repeated many times. Communities across the world have battled to protect themselves from the pollution and stench of factory farms, hog-confinement facilities most of all.
The most successful legal bat
tles against hog factory farms in the United States have focused on their incredible potential to pollute. (When people talk about the environmental toll of animal agriculture, this is a large part of what they’re talking about.) The problem is quite simple: massive amounts of shit. So much shit, so poorly managed, that it seeps into rivers, lakes, and oceans — killing wildlife and polluting air, water, and land in ways devastating to human health.
Today a typical pig factory farm will produce 7.2 million pounds of manure annually, a typical broiler facility will produce 6.6 million pounds, and a typical cattle feedlot 344 million pounds. The General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that individual farms “can generate more raw waste than the populations of some U.S. cities.” All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population — roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals — no toilets, obviously, but also no sewage pipes, no one hauling it away for treatment, and almost no federal guidelines regulating what happens to it. (The GAO reports that no federal agency even collects reliable data on factory farms or so much as knows the number of permitted factory farms nationally and therefore cannot “effectively regulate” them.) So what does happen to the shit? I’ll focus specifically on the fate of the shit of America’s leading pork producer, Smithfield.
Smithfield alone annually kills more individual hogs than the combined human populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Fort Worth, and Memphis — some 31 million animals. According to conservative EPA figures, each hog produces two to four times as much shit as a person; in Smithfield’s case, the number is about 281 pounds of shit for each American citizen. That means that Smithfield — a single legal entity — produces at least as much fecal waste as the entire human population of the states of California and Texas combined.